The house was built in 1913 using the carpentry techniques available at the time (duh). This did not, as it turns out, include glue. So each stair was held up by supporting wood pieces that stretched from the edges of each tread down to the floor. This is an elegant system when the fit is perfect, which it probably was 103 years ago. That support had eroded over the intervening years, which worsened as the house settled. When we shone a flashlight under the stairs, we saw that most of those supporting pieces were just laying on the ground. The stairs were sagging, tilting and pulling away from the wall. Long past the point where a repair could save the staircase. This was a huge drag because it was an unexpected expense, but after whining and sighing to each other for a while, we sucked it up and moved forward with replacing the staircase altogether.

We started by taking out the bottom two stairs so that we could have the flooring patched and altered to support the new setup.

We had to use this step ladder to get up and down the stairs for a while. Fortunately we hadn’t moved into the house yet.

Then the whole shebang was ripped out.

Here it is, all gone. The flooring in the back is from the closet.

View to the upstairs

Crazy, right? It was a shocking sight to behold. It looked so stark and bare. Luckily it wasn’t like this for long.